William Morris and E. Belfort Bax

Socialism From The Root Up -
Chapter 2 - Mediæval Society

We have now to deal with that Mediæval Society
which was based on the fusion of ideas of tribal communism and Roman individualism
and bureaucracy. The fullest, and one may say the most pedantic type of this
society is to be found in the Mediæval German Empire; it was modified
somewhat in other countries; in France by the fact that several of the other
potentates, as, eg., the Duke of Burgundy, were theoretically independent of the
King, and practically were often at least as powerful. In England, on the contrary,
the monarchy soon gained complete predominance over the great barons, and a kind of
bureaucracy soon sprang up which interfered with the full working of the feudal
system.

The theory of this feudal system is the existence of an unbroken chain of service
from the serf up to the emperor, and of protection from the emperor down to the
serf; it recognizes no absolute ownership of land; God is the one owner of the
earth, the emperor and his kings are his vice-gerents there, who may devolve their
authority to their feudal vassals, and they in turn to theirs, and so on till it
reaches the serf, the proletarian, on whom all this hierarchy lives, and who has no
rights as regard his own lord except protection from others outside the manor that
he lives and works on; to him his personal lord was the incarnation of the
compulsion and protection of God, which all men acknowledged and looked for.

It is quite clear that this system was mixed up with religious ideas of some sort;
accordingly, we find that the Middle Ages had a distinct religion of their own,
developed from that early Christianity which was one of the forces that broke up
the Roman Empire. As long as that Empire lasted in its integrity, Christianity was
purely individualistic; it bade every man do his best for his future in another
world, and had no commands to give about the government of this world except to
obey 'the powers that be' in non-religious matters, in order to escape troubles and
complications which might distract his attention from the kingdom of God.

But in Mediæval Christianity, although this idea of individual devotion to
the perfection of the next world still existed, it was kept in the background, and
was almost dormant in the presence of the idea of the Church, which was not merely
a link between the earthly and the heavenly kingdoms, but even may be said to have
brought the kingdom of heaven to earth by breathing its spirit into the temporal
power, which it recognized as another manifes-tation of its own authority.
Therefore, the struggles of the Temporal and Spiritual Powers, which form so large
a part of the history of the Middle Ages, were not the result of antagonism of
ideas between the two, but came of the tendency of one side of the great
organization of Society to absorb the other without rejecting its theory; in short,
on the one hand the Church was political and social rather than religious, while on
the other the State was at least as much religious as it was political and social.

Such, then, was the theory of Mediæval Society; but apart from whatever of
oppression on life and thought was inherent in it, the practice of the theory was
liable to many abuses, to which the obvious confusion and misery of the times are
mostly referable. These abuses again were met by a protest in the form of almost
constant rebellion against Society, of which one may take as examples the organized
vagabondage of Middle Europe, the Jacquerie in France, and in England what may be
called the chronic rebellion of the Foresters, which produced such an impression on
the minds of the people, that it has given birth to the ballad epic known by the
name of its mythical hero, Robin Hood. Resistance to authority and contempt of the
'Rights of Property' are the leading ideas in this rough but noble poetry.

Besides these irregular protests against the oppression of the epoch, there was
another factor at work in its modifi-cation -- the Gilds, which forced themselves
into the system, and were accepted as a regular part of it.

The ideas which went with the survivals of the primitive communism of the tribes
were, on the one hand, absorbed into the feudal system and formed part of it, but
on the other, they developed associations for mutual protection and help, which at
first were merely a kind of benefit societies according to the ideas of the times.
These were followed by associations for the protection of trade, which were called
the gilds-merchant. From these the development was two-fold: they were partly
transformed into the corporations of the free towns, which had already began (sic)
to be founded from other developments, and partly into the craft-gilds, or
organizations for the protection and regulation of handicrafts -- which latter were
the result of a radical reform of the gilds-merchant, accomplished not without a
severe struggle, often accompanied by actual and very bitter war. The last remains
of these craft-gilds are traceable in the names of the city companies of London.

It should be noted that this tendency to association was bitterly opposed in its
earlier days by the potentates of both Church and State, especially in those
countries which had been more under the influence of the Roman empire. But in the
long-run it could not be resisted, and at last both the gilds and the free towns
which their emancipated labour had created or developed were favoured (as well as
fleeced) by the bureaucratic kings as a make-weight to the powerful nobles and the
Church.

The condition of one part of mediæval life industrial was thus quite altered.
In the earlier Middle Ages the serf not only did all the field-work, but also most
of the handicrafts, which now fell entirely into the hands of the gilds. It must be
noted also that in their best days there were no mere journeymen in these crafts; a
workshop was manned simply by the workman and his apprentices, who would, when
their time was out, become members of the gild like himself: mastership, in our
sense of the word, was unknown.

By about the year 1350 the craft-gilds were fully developed and triumphant; and
that date may conveniently be accepted as the end of the first part of the Middle
Ages. By this time serfdom generally was beginning to yield to the change
introduced by the gilds and free towns: the field serfs partly drifted into the
towns and became affiliated to the gilds, and partly became free men, though living
on lands whose tenure was unfree -- copyholders, we should call them. This movement
towards the break-up of serfdom is marked by the peasant's war in England led by
Wat Tyler and John Ball in Kent, and John Litster (dyer) in East Anglia, which was
the answer of the combined yeomen, emancipated and unemancipated serfs, to the
attempt of the nobles to check the movement.

But the development of the craft-gilds and the flocking in of the freed serfs into
the towns laid the foundations for another change in industrialism: with the second
part of the mediæval period appears the journeyman, or so-called free
labourer. Besides the craftsmaster and his apprentices, the workshop now has these
'free labourers' in it -- unprivileged workmen, that is, who were nevertheless
under the domination of the gild, and compelled to affiliation with it. The
gildsmen now began to be privileged workmen; and with them began the foundation of
the present middle-class, whose development from this source went on to meet its
other development on the side of trade which was now becoming noticeable. In 1453
Constantinople was taken by the Turks; the art of printing was spreading; Greek
manuscripts were being discovered and read; a thirst for new or revived learning,
outside the superstitions of the mediæval Church and the quaint, curiously
perverted and half-understood remains of popular traditions, was arising, and all
was getting ready for the transformation of mediæval into modern or
commercial society.